This year, the hottest chef in America can be found at a Milwaukie deli and wine shop.

Earlier this week, readers of the Eater National restaurant blog voted Oregon's Pascal Sauton the top chef in the nation, not for his cooking skills, per se, but for his looks, magnetism and sex appeal.

That the French-born owner of Milwaukie Kitchen & Wine is "over 50, fat and bald" (his words) didn't stop 3,790 voters from picking him over talented cooks with model looks from across the U.S.

Sauton has charm in spades, but he never would have won the contest without his sense of humor ...

Lunch crowd abuzz

On Thursday, Sauton's Milwaukie Kitchen & Wine is buzzing at lunch with a surprising large crowd, especially for a town better known for its comic-book concentration and transit troubles than its restaurants. A woman behind the register tells me Sauton is "staying out of the limelight" in his back office after appearances on the radio and
all four local TV stations.

Eventually, Sauton ambles out and shakes my hand.

"Never underestimate the power of the media," he says.

Sauton, in a light-blue denim shirt, says business actually started booming before the contest ended, with The Oregonian's Feb. 15 review of the store's supper series. By then, the 54-year-old chef, who would certainly get a callback for the role of chef Auguste Gusteau if Pixar ever produced a live-action version of "Ratatouille," had already hatched his plan to sabotage Eater's competition.

Sauton gathered two friends, Plate & Pitchfork founder Erika Polmar and local food photographer Dina Avila, to help him stage a nomination photo. In the resulting picture, Sauton lounges on the cool stove at his Milwaukie Kitchen & Wine, his chef's whites unbuttoned, a Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboy perched just above his smooth, round belly.

While the Pabst tallboy is the most noticeable prop -- "PBR is the beer of cooks," Sauton says -- there are other, easier-to-miss touches. Note the corndog with ketchup on a plate at left, the pack of Camels in Sauton's shirtfront pocket and cigarette behind his ear.

View full sizePascal Sauton strikes a pose in the photo that won him a national food blog's "Hottest Chef in America" competition. Courtesy of Dina Avila

More funny than flattering, the photo was an instant hit on Eater PDX, effectively splitting the vote between pretty pastry chefs and hunky line cooks. Sauton stoked the flames online, stumping on Facebook and encouraging friends to vote. He received encouraging messages from local business and votes from acquaintances as far away as Australia and Ukraine.

After winning the local bracket, Sauton demolished the Western regionals. But when he saw his competitors in the final round, he thought he was sunk.

"In the final, the girl from Boston with the cute curly hair, sitting on the stool with the shorts," Sauton says, placing his fist in his mouth. "That girl is beautiful, oh my God."

When Sauton was a young boy in France, the idea of a "hottest chef" competition would have been ludicrous. Chefs were just starting to own their own restaurants, and personality-centric food blogs and shows were as impossible to imagine as the Internet and HDTV.

When he was 16, he took his first restaurant job at Paris' Lasserre, an 80-seat restaurant with 20 cooks. In those early days, "hottest chef" meant the warm hunting season days when young chefs were put in a back room and asked to pluck game birds by hand.

At the time, Lasserre boasted three stars in the prestigious Michelin restaurant guide. It was something of a celebrity hangout, with visitors including Audrey Hepburn, Marc Chagall and French writer André Malraux. Surrealist Salvador Dalí would stop in to eat Ortolan, the thin-boned French bird that is force-fed, drowned in brandy then served whole to diners with napkins draped over their heads.

Sauton moved to the United States in 1985, eventually landing in Portland, where his first job was at downtown jazz hotspot Brasserie Montmartre. He opened his own bistro, downtown Portland's Carafe, with ex-wife Julie Hunter in 2004 (he's now single), then left in 2011. Later that year, Sauton took his talents south to Milwaukie, where he set up his wine shop and deli.

Over the past week, between prepping for various dinners, Sauton peeked at the Eater results with daughter Prunelle. After a close race early Wednesday, Sauton pulled ahead for a comfortable win, topping McMahon by more than 1,000 votes.

After the win, Milwaukie mayor Jeremy Ferguson visited the store, calling Sauton the best brand ambassador the town could ask for.

Once, while reading Facebook messages praising his geniality, Sauton broke out in tears in front of Prunelle.

"In the end, this was not about being hot, or being funny," he says. "It was a show of support that I'm a nice guy."